VP? Probably.
> When you foresaw this huge danger to your employer, ten years in advance, you didn't keep mentioning it to people
It only takes a couple of slaps to make us shut up[0]. They didn't want to hear from me, so I stopped trying to tell them stuff. Simple.
In this case, what I did, was start learning about the iPhone, and start doing coding on my own, once Apple allowed us into the system (They didn't actually publish the iOS API for a while). I actually wrote a number of apps that would have integrated our products with the iPhone, as the years went by, but ... you guessed it ... they were ignored. I considered them as practice.
I remember once, one of my Japanese peers saying "You know, I sometimes see something, and say to myself 'Chris mentioned this, like three years ago.'." But he never listened to me, at the time I was mentioning that. In fact, even after telling me that, he still refused to listen.
I knew the company was being steered into the rocks, and was not allowed to help correct the course, so I spent my time, preparing a lifeboat. I don't have to justify to anyone, why I stuck around. If I have to explain, they wouldn't understand.
Ego is a powerful force. We will utterly destroy ourselves, in order to salve our own insecurities.
> change companies
That seems to be everyone's answer, these days. I guess I'm stupid. I have not found it an attractive choice.
[0] "A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a joke or worried to death by a frown on the right person's brow."
-Charles Browder